Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   interfaces and metaphor
Thursday, October 15 2009 [REDACTED]
This evening, after Gretchen and her father came home, we all had a big dinner similar to the one we'd had with Deborah this weekend. There were tamales, there was chocolate molé chile, and there were also brussel sprouts from the garden. I'd used a saw to cut off the four-foot-tall stalks and Gretchen's mother had harvested the individual sprouts.
But enough about food. The truth of the matter is that I am not especially interested in food. I eat it when I need it and can discern the difference between good food and bad food. But that's it. I don't really think much about food except when I'm hungry and consider it a dull topic. But Gretchen is different. Food interests her greatly, and tonight she and her father (who also likes to talk about food) went off on an extended hour-long dialogue about food preparation in great detail. By this point my gut was full and my eyes were glazed over and nothing in the world could have been less interesting.
I went over to the couch to lie down, eventually picking up the copy of The Lightness of Being that I've been reading. It's interesting to read about cutting-edge particle physics theory in layman's terms, but the imprecision of English when discussing these matters renders whole chapters of the book into something akin to rhetorical mud. The only solution is either page after page of equations or ingenious metaphors. Sadly, Frank Wilczek (the Nobel-Prize-winning author) includes only a little of the former and almost none of the latter. The lack of equations is understandable in a book for popular consumption, but the paucity of metaphors is inexcusable. Metaphors are the essence of translation, and there is nothing in greater need of translation than the description of what is known about contemporary particle physics, a world where common sense provides almost no insights whatsoever.


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